You’ve set up your blog, developed some backlinks and popularity, and now you’re ready to monetize! Here are a few things you can consider if you want to monetize your blog. There are many other ways to make money with your blog, but these are some of the popular ways.

• Pay Per Click Ads
• Banner Advertising
• Paid Reviews

You should probably hold off on monetizing your blog for a few months after starting it, as you’ll want to focus mainly on creating quality content and backlinks. Once you are ready, though, you can start incorporating ads into your blog. Obviously they are going to have to be visible, but try to make them fit naturally into your layout. Don’t cover your blog in ads – especially in the beginning – as it may decrease your blog traffic, which is the opposite of what any new blog needs.

Pay Per Click Ads

When you use these ads on your blog, you are paid for every time a reader on your site clicks an ad. These are typically referred to as PPC ads or PPC campaigns. If you’re using PPC ads, you’ll want to make sure you post the ad somewhere obvious and visible on your site so that your users can see it. Still try to make sure it fits well into your layout, and doesn’t look random or out of place. Google Adsense is one of the most popular types of PPC ads.

Banner Ads

You can also make money blogging with ads.  With these ads, advertisers pay you for space on your blog, and you put their banner there. Banners come in a different sizes (125×125 and 300×250 are just a few). You can put them in different places throughout your blog. For example, you might have a side bar for ads. You can also use the long horizontal ads and intersperse them between your posts. Don’t use too many though, or you might lose some of your readers.

Paid Reviews

Another blog advertisement you can experiment with are paid reviews, but the better integrated these are into your blog, the more natural your blog will look and thus it will attract more readers… and ultimately the better it will work. (Therefore you might want to wait until you already have a good deal of entries and some backlinks). If they think you are being paid to endorse something, readers may leave or be turned off. So if you are doing this, you should put a disclaimer somewhere on the blog that says it. Give fair reviews to gain reader trust.

Interspersed with other content, these can give real dimension to your blog. If you have a cooking blog, for example, do some posts about recipes, and then a review of some cooking product or website. This is probably even better than a blog just about recipes, as it gives your reader something more to do than just read. Variety (within your subject of course; do not post about something off topic) will spruce up your blog and make it really attractive.

And as always… Keep the Content Coming

Continue to post regularly; if you stop or the gaps between posts are too long, you won’t be able to maintain a readership as viewers will not be willing to keep checking your blog. Some people say that you won’t make money from the beginning and others say you can. My advice is to be patient. If you start out with ads all over your blog, people might think you are only interested in making money and it might repel readers. It’s a cliché for a reason: “slow and steady wins the race”.